Cryptocurrencies are not exactly bathed in the light of righteousness right now when it comes to the environment. Despite not having a physical form, they are ultimately responsible for a substantial amount of environmental impact. This has stemmed from news stories detailing how, in Iceland, more electricity is being used to mine Bitcoin than is used to power its homes, or that Bitcoin mining now uses as much energy as all of Ireland consumes. Sensationalist as these headlines might be, there is no denying that Bitcoin, Ethereum and the myriad of minable altcoins are responsible for significant power consumption today.

These headlines are why people are more aware of the perceived negative impacts of cryptocurrency mining than they are of the process of mining itself. To grossly oversimplify the process, every 10 minutes a bundle of transactions are encrypted in a block, which is added to the blockchain. Bitcoin miners bundle said transactions into blocks by hashing the transactions together in a Merkle tree, then solving a so-called “proof-of-work” puzzle. This puzzle takes the form of a series of mathematical equations used one after another until the “winning” equation is solved. At this point, the block is verified and added to the blockchain. In return, the miner (or consortium) receive the transaction fees and a predetermined allocation of coins for their efforts. For Bitcoin, this reward currently amounts to roughly $14 million per day.

Critically, the difficulty of the mining task adjusts automatically every two weeks in order to maintain a block creation rate of roughly one every 10 minutes. This means that increasing computing power will not result in more coins being created. Instead, the computation task just consumes more computing power to maintain the status quo of production. This system makes existing mining hardware less profitable and drives up the amount of energy consumed per bitcoin earned.

According to Digiconomist, the Bitcoin network currently consumes about 71 TWh of electricity per year, with the Ethereum network a distant second consuming about 21 TWh. Together, they account for energy consumption on par with the United Arab Emirates (~96 TWh per year). Economist Alex de Vries boldly predicted currency mining could consume 0.5 percent of the world’s energy in 2018, something that has put cryptocurrencies — and bitcoin in particular — in the firing line of multiple environmental groups.

Obviously, this would be a moot point if all mining was being powered by renewable sources like solar, wind or hydroelectric power (Iceland is powered entirely by geothermal and hydro power for example). However, an estimated 60 percent of the mining hash power originates from China. Furthermore, 70 percent of the electricity in China is generated by non-renewable sources, particularly coal. It shows that Iceland’s sustainable cryptomining is the exception rather than the rule. Put simply, cryptomining is not all powered by coal, but it mostly is.

Common environmental criticisms of cryptocurrencies often neglect to put the issue in the context of the wider financial sector’s impact. The devastating physical mining of metals to create obsolete coins is a key example. Also, the big banks are fundamentally unable to wean themselves off the massive energy consumption required to keep every headquarters, branch and ATM operating.

That said, if the crypto community really believes itself to be the future, it needs to do better than finger-pointing and petty whataboutism when it comes to environmental issues. How, therefore, do we rehabilitate crypto and blockchain technology to be greener?

The idea of “green crypto” is not a misnomer. There are initiatives out there that encourage more responsible cryptomining. The Canadian province of Québec has actively courted cryptocurrency companies to use its spare hydropower capacity. Recently, actor William Shatner threw his significant weight behind Solar Alliance, a Canadian company building a three-megawatt solar farm that can be rented out to cryptocurrency miners.

The emergence of similar projects is a positive sign for greater investment in crypto’s greener side. While most of these projects receive the bulk of their funding through the ICO route, more traditional investments and partnerships have been effective in driving mainstream visibility of the solutions they provide. Electrify Asia is one such project, raising $29 million through an ICO and going on to secure the backing of one of Ethereum’s original founding team members Wendell Davis, along with prominent Japanese VC group Global Brain.

Another example of mainstream investment in green crypto projects is Climate Coin, which has the backing of tech specialist PAL Capital. Climate Coin operates as a crypto-based carbon credit that can be purchased by anyone worldwide to offset their carbon footprint. On a macro level, energy-focused blockchain startups like this raised over $300 million between Q2 2017 and Q1 2018 alone, most of which came through ICOs. This level of investment, in what would have been a technological fantasy only a short time ago, is a sign that blockchain technology is being taken seriously by energy companies.

From an economic standpoint, increased investment from existing utility companies is inevitable. Blockchains’ penchant for decentralization blends well with existing energy-saving practices. In small scale use cases, the technology is enabling smaller companies to enter markets long monopolized by big energy companies.

Various initiatives are using a peer-to-peer exchange model to trade cheap renewable energy, circumventing the need and cost of buying energy from established suppliers. By motivating small renewable energy producers to sell directly to energy users, and using smart contracts to earn credits in the form of fungible crypto assets from any excess power produced, there is an opportunity to make the existing energy ecosystem cheaper, more efficient and consumer friendly.

While less common, there are still many crypto- and blockchain-based companies directly addressing environmental unsustainability. One blockchain-based initiative is the Plastic Bank, run with the support of partners including IBM. It is issuing tokens earned from collecting plastic waste to help impoverished communities. These tokens can then be converted into cash, exchanged for cooking fuel or education vouchers, demonstrating the good that this technology can do for the less fortunate.

Energi Mine is using a similar system, providing the cryptocurrency EnergiTokens (ETK) to consumers when they engage in energy-saving activities such as using public transport or buying energy-efficient appliances to reduce energy consumption. The ultimate goal of this is to cut global energy demand and carbon emissions by creating a system of financial incentives, which will subtlety shift positive energy decisions to become unconscious reflexes.

In this way, some blockchain and cryptocurrency companies are taking a holistic approach to tackling the established "rebound effect" — where the reduction in energy consumption created by new technologies and new efficiencies gets cancelled out by negative behavioral or other systemic responses. This is something that happens often without people realizing it. For instance, a 5 percent improvement in vehicle fuel efficiency may result in only a 3 percent drop in fuel use because 2 percent more fuel is consumed by people being able to afford to drive faster or further than before.

This is a well-documented phenomenon in the conservation space, and cryptominers are especially guilty of this. Every advancement in processor efficiency or cooling is negated by the gradual upward creep in mining power consumption needed to stay competitive.

This very phenomenon, however, could provide an opportunity for the industry to contribute to energy-saving technology in a huge way. The power/efficiency ratio demanded by cryptominers has given rise to an arms race in specialized hardware that can be used to mine cryptocurrencies more efficiently. A meaningful investment in green tech here would have an impact not only on the crypto community, but on the green hardware sector as a whole, especially if some of the breakthroughs can be extrapolated to other uses, which would go a long way toward creating a "good citizen" reputation for the crypto space.

Whether it is making sure that the energy for cryptomining comes from renewable sources, or simply investing in green-minded initiatives pioneered by the crypto and blockchain community, everyone in the sector can do something to reduce or offset its environmental impact. If crypto truly is the future of money, then the crypto community should feel obliged to do more to change the world for the better. Not just from a financial standpoint but from an environmental one as well.

This is a guest post by Omar Rahim, CEO of Energi Mine. Views expressed are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Bitcoin Magazine or BTC Inc.

To Mark Pascall, co-founder of BlockchainLabs New Zealand (NZ) and president of the Blockchain Association NZ, the blockchain space is more than just a new technology layer, it’s a “fundamentally different way for organizations and societies to operate.”

It represents a historical reversal of the movement toward an evermore centralized society.

“The major problem is that without mass decentralization, we get a bigger and bigger wealth disparity between the rich and the poor,” Pascall said in an interview with Bitcoin Magazine.

Although we were in a hunter-gatherer society and it was relatively easy to protect assets many centuries ago, as society became more complex we built more things of value and so had to build bigger things to protect those things.

Pascall explained that this has led to requiring third parties to protect our assets — like banking systems and the sovereign state — and these institutions are fundamentally rooted in a logic of violence.

The shift toward a centralized society took place over many hundreds of years, but it wasn’t until the invention of the World Wide Web in the 1980s, that the “internet accelerated that centralization to an alarming degree,” says Pascall.

“Now, the boundaries have been hit as we’ve got global monopolies. We’ve got five or six companies who own alarming amounts of data and wealth and control.”

They control how we think, they control how we vote now, and that’s a pretty scary space, and they’re very difficult to displace. We know the network effectively is very powerful and it would be incredibly hard for somebody else to displace Facebook with another decentralized model.

Globally, many people’s awareness of current events is shaped by Facebook and Google, which determine, with hidden algorithms, what information we see and consume.

But Pascall hopes blockchain technology can now enable these monopolies to be undone in order to create “a better, fairer, more equitable society.”

This is why he believes many are so passionate about the potential of the blockchain space; it carries potential to shift power away from some of the world’s most extreme monopolies.

“So the blockchain is this infrastructure that can allow that centralization to move to a decentralized world,” says Pascall.

While many people talk about the blockchain as a decentralized ledger or a database, Pascall believes that this narrow definition “in itself is missing the point.”

So what is the point? Pascall draws another lesson from history: the creators of the first internet in the 1980s didn’t actually make any money out of it.

The inventors of the so-called “fat applications” — the Googles, Facebooks and Amazons — were people who now extract massive value out of that fat layer on the thin protocol and make the money.

Now, blockchain technology enables people to build fat protocols that are open source; these are open, transparent protocols built by communities of developers.

The people who come up with these new ideas and protocols, the startups, can raise a lot of money to support them in building communities to develop these second-layer, foundational bits of the internet.

“There is a bit of a wild west money grab out there and I think that’s one of the things the ICO concept has driven.

“In the last century when we saw the dotcom craziness and then the crash — there’s a bit of that going on, so we are going to see, out of the thousands of ICOs that are being generated now, a bunch of core foundational protocols emerging which will be open, community-driven, fully decentralized, with no central organization or person. They’ll be controlled by the token holders, which could be you or anybody, so those will emerge as the winners,” says Pascall.

“It should get us to a more equitable place where it’s not just the high net worth people in Silicon Valley or in Singapore or in London who are the financial investors who are making the big money — it should democratize that space.

“We can now share in a fairer system and a tokenized economy where everything can be tokenized, from a football team to a building to a new idea, and they can be fully liquid and tradable, and individuals can become their own Swiss Bank,” he says.

So blockchain technology and tokenization will enable the purchase of more assets and remove previous barriers to trading and investing that meant that, previously, this was often reserved for the wealthy few.

“How I think about it is that the internet democratized knowledge, the blockchain will democratize wealth,” he adds.

“That’s the positive future that a lot of people in the blockchain space see, and that’s why we’re passionate about it.”

Google is the latest tech giant to offer blockchain technology to its customers. The company announced that it would be introducing open-source integrations for applications built with both Ethereum and Hyperledger later this year through its Google Cloud Product marketplace.

Speaking with Bitcoin Magazine, executive director of Hyperledger Brian Behlendorf explains, “This decision follows a similar path taken by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and cloud-hosting services offered by Oracle, Huawei and IBM to offer ready-made templates for their ‘blockchain as a service’ offerings. There is growing interest in blockchain enterprise development options. This is one of the kinds of services offered by more than 60 companies participating in the Hyperledger Vendor Directory.”

Google has allegedly held an interest in blockchain technology for years and was the most active investor in blockchain startups and applications between 2012 and 2017, after Japan’s SBI Holdings.

According to Behlendorf, the search engine’s interest in Hyperledger is due in part to its latest project entitled “Hyperledger Fabric.” He states that Fabric is a leading enterprise blockchain platform that runs dozens of production enterprise networks across finance, healthcare and supply chain applications. It also has hundreds of pilots in operation.

“Unlike other systems, it has support for writing business logic (what you might call ‘smart contracts’) in Go, JavaScript, and soon Java,” he explains. “It has also been fine-tuned to operate in environments where performance (time to finality, combined with the number of transactions per second) are optimized.”

Behlendorf is confident Hyperledger can bring a lot to the table and offer Google’s customers access to an array of new tools and products they never even knew existed.

“We hope Google finds Hyperledger Fabric and other related technologies to be capable and easy-to-support options for its customers to build and operate enterprise blockchain networks and applications,” he says.

“As it is open-source, and all development is done publicly, we think Google will benefit from the high velocity of development on Fabric by the broad and active user and developer community. Hopefully, they’ll find bugs and help us fix them! That will help them provide a better offering than any proprietary or in-house alternative might. For us, the potential for more developer contributions — and maybe another logo to add to our vendor directory — will be really helpful.”

Founded in December 2015, Hyperledger is a vendor-neutral home for the collaborative and open-source development of blockchain technology platforms and tools. As a “coin agnostic” system, it does not require a specific token or currency to operate and is not funded by initial coin offerings (ICOs). The company boasts over 250 members in its consortium and uses this technology to build products and services for both internal and resale purposes.

About the Guests:
-- Lisa Cheng is the Founder and Head of R&D of Etherparty. She currently serves as an Advisor for emerging tech startups and has an expertise in Business Development and Product Strategy. Her background includes Fortune 500 companies, Enterprise Sales, Big Data, and SaaS.

Access to personal financial data and the emergence of blockchain technology have been the catalyst for a revolution in the banking sector. At the start of this year, banks within the European Union were ordered by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to grant customers access to their personal data.

Banks must allow customers ownership of their financial data which they can then share with other banks and regulated financial businesses to shop around for a better deal — such as getting a cheaper overdraft.

With Open Banking, anything from customer transaction history and product information to branch locations will now be owned by the customer, not the bank.

This combination of available financial data and new possibilities for blockchain-driven efficiencies have made the climate ripe for the disruption of traditional investment banks.

“Accenture has estimated that some major investment banks could make a whopping $10 billion in efficiency savings by utilizing blockchain technology,” explains Thomas Levene, founder of Best Blockchain Solutions Consultancy.

“In current systems, there needs to be careful checks and balances of huge amounts of data that can prove time consuming for investment banks and remain open to some degree of error.”

For example, blockchains carry the promise of making international money transfers cheaper and faster for all parties involved. And while it may be in fledgling stages of innovation, once the technology has proven its speed and scaling abilities, investment banks and international settlements will undoubtedly become increasingly comfortable as transaction partners.

Levene explains, “The other side of the crypto coin is that while existing investment houses need to adapt and adopt, they could very well be replaced, at least in part, by new blockchain startups that have the potential to ‘eat their lunch.’ And it’s a big lunch. In the 2017 fiscal year, Goldman Sachs amassed $32 billion."

Currently for large issuers, it’s a given that you simply have to use investment banks. But assuming regulatory compliance, it doesn’t need to be this way.

The Upstarts

“Companies like tZero, whose Chief Executive Officer is the founder of Overstock, are aimed at eating some J.P. Morgan lunch. They are creating a distributed ledger platform for capital markets. Some have called this offering, whose ICO finishes at the end of June 2018, WallStreet 2.0, as they aim to fuse traditional finance with the benefits of a token crypto economy,” says Levene.

Using blockchains, compliance for investment banks could be fully automated. Dividends and voting could also be done on the blockchain automatically and without expensive backroom office administrators.

This elimination of middlemen coupled with unlimited access to the market, day or night and even on weekends, is set to revolutionize the finance sector.

Thus, it’s no surprise that significant numbers of blockchain-based prediction market platforms and exchanges have sprung up to challenge the dominance of traditional investment banks.

Augur, Bodhi, Numerai and Artificial Intelligence Exchange are just a few of the firms that have launched with decentralized prediction market protocols and exchanges, and if these new models prove to be better than current systems, they could soon be snatched up by investment banks eager to protect their market share.

Polymath is challenging the status quo of capital markets with a network that connects token investors, KYC providers, smart contract developers, and legal experts to help firms form the basis of their securities token.

Meanwhile, Globitex is one of several platforms making it possible to buy commodities with crypto assets.

Not Going Down Without a Fight

In response to these new market entrants, the traditional sector has been hedging its bet on beating the upstarts through significant adaptation and adoption of new technologies.

Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan and Santander have been making moves to couple with blockchain technology.

“It’s not surprising that investment banks, including Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan, are getting on board with blockchain,” Levene says. “These two apparently completed a test in the $2.8 trillion equity swaps market with a 100% success rate using blockchain technology.”

J.P. Morgan has also established a Blockchain Centre of Excellence, and Goldman Sachs has revealed plans to setup a trading operation in Bitcoin. Meanwhile, Santander has joined the blockchain with the launch of a new foreign exchange payment system, One Pay FX.

As with brick-and-mortar industries that are slowly fading away to the globalism of the online world, so too will the traditional prediction market industry have to innovate to keep up with the sheer efficiency, reliability and security that the decentralized prediction markets promise to bring.

Augur (REP) has grabbed headlines lately with the launch of its highly anticipated prediction market earlier this month. Ethereum-based futures market DApp Gnosis (GNO) is also under development and running on the Ethereum testnet. Meanwhile, Bodhi (BOT/BOE), another decentralized application, has been operating on the Qtum mainnet since April 23, 2018.

These decentralized prediction platforms aim to disrupt the institutional futures markets by lowering the barrier to entry, allowing more people to cast predictions on a global scale and increase the mindshare of information; creating transparency in the prediction process via the blockchain ledger and smart contracts; increasing the integrity and accountability of payments; and lowering the costs to transact in the prediction markets.

Predictions can be made on just about anything: 1) the financial markets, 2) information in general, 3) insurance claims, 4) sports lotteries, or 5) anything that isn’t immoral. For instance, the financial markets would gladly welcome Michael-Burry-number-crunching predictions on what to invest in and the general information markets would benefit from open-sourced information, in which participants use their closed-source information and other resources they may have to support their prediction analysis.

How Does Bodhi Work?

Bodhi is a DApp that currently runs on the Qtum (QTUM) network, using the QRC20 token BOT and QTUM to run on the Qtum network. The team plans to include the Ethereum (ETH) user base by allowing Bodhi to run on the Ethereum network through its cross-chain implementation initiative; they have already created the ERC20 token Bodhi On Ethereum (BOE). The Bodhi Ethereum DApp is expected be released on the Ethereum network in Q4 2018, according to Bodhi Founder Xiahong Lin in an interview with Bitcoin Magazine.

On the Qtum platform, QTUM is used to pay for the transaction fees to operate on the Qtum network and to wager bets and the BOT is used “primarily to arbitrate against bad actors,” Lin said. In this way, both QTUM and BOT are needed to power the Bodhi DApp on the Qtum network. Similarly, when Bodhi is released on the Ethereum network, ether will be used to pay for the Ethereum network transaction fees and to wager bets and BOE will be used “mainly to arbitrate against bad actors,” according to Lin.

Although the current version only supports wagering with QTUM, the Bodhi DApp is designed to scale and allow it to use any cryptocurrency that is not a security, meaning it can eventually run on stablecoins and others. This larger scope means more people will be able to contribute their research and place a bet on that research to predict the outcome of a prediction — which should lead to better prediction results.

Bodhi uses third-party oracles to verify predictions; to further increase autonomy, when the BOT/BOE holders involved in a prediction contest the result, BOT/BOE holders can each participate in voting directly for the answer themselves. If a previous round’s result is not contested within 48 hours, it is then locked in and becomes the final result of the prediction.

However, if the prediction result is contested within the time limit, then the new round requires 10 percent more BOT/BOE than in the previous round to place a vote on the new result in the current round. The result from the previous round(s) is no longer able to be voted on in the current round. For example, consider there are four prediction results to vote on: A, B, C and D. If the previous round’s BOT/BOE holders majority vote resulted in answer A in the last round, then in the current round, any result other than A can be voted on, and it’s only in a round after the current one that prediction result A can be voted on again.

This voting process continues until the BOT/BOE holders no longer contest the result. This helps dial in the result to the correct result by requiring 10 percent more BOT/BOE than in the previous round to cast a vote. The voting process is meant to make it harder for bad actors to overpower the system and it uses “game theory as a theory of conflict resolution,” according to Lin.

The question of immoral predictions is a real concern. However, Bodhi seeks to address this by allowing BOT/BOE stakeholders to moderate the community by voting on which predictions the community deems illegal or malevolent which, in turn, should allow the stakeholders to preserve their shared interest in the platform.

The Road Map

Lin said Bodhi is developing a social media plugin to put the power of the decentralized prediction market at the fingertips of social media users, starting with the social media platform WeChat, creating a seamless integration between the centralized and the decentralized. Lin described it this way:

“User experience and user growth are the two key metrics for building a widely adopted prediction market. The Bodhi social network plugin will allow users to create a prediction market directly within a social network and easily share it with their friends to participate. Imagine that you are in a WeChat group, while you are talking about some topic, you create a prediction event with respect to that topic right away, and your friends can make predictions immediately. We are going to build a social network gadget that can associate your social network account with your Qtum/Ethereum wallet, so that it will automatically take your input within a social network and synchronize it with Bodhi’s prediction market.”

They also have “Bodhi Light” in the works: the development of a lightweight Bodhi application client version “which is meant to remove the need for the Qtum desktop wallet in [the] DApp,” Lin said.

Following a successful 2016 trial of blockchain technology in an interbank open account transaction, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) has partnered with five international and Australian companies to ship 17 tonnes of almonds from Melbourne, Australia, to Hamburg, Germany, using a new distributed ledger platform built on the Ethereum blockchain.

The Experiment

Originating in Sunraysia, the shipment made its way to Western Europe in a pioneering experiment that combined a private blockchain, smart contracts and a geotracking Internet of Things (IoT) framework to facilitate end-to-end movement of the almonds. Using the joint solution, the entire process was seamlessly tracked and verified remotely from the point of origin to delivery in real time.

Taking part in the procedure alongside the CBA were Pacific National, Olam Richards Australia Pty Ltd, OOCL Limited, Patrick Terminals and LX Group. The primary purpose of the experiment was to establish a reliable framework for digitization of the three pillars of international commerce, namely documentation, operations/logistics and finance. This was done using a custom blockchain which hosted all information regarding container location, task completion status and shipping documents.

Using the information provided by four IoT devices inside the container, transaction partners could track cargo location in real time and view real-time cargo data, such as temperature and humidity. The information was accessed through the blockchain platform, making it impervious to manipulation.

“Our blockchain-enabled global trade platform experiment brought to life the idea of a modern global supply chain that is agile, efficient and transparent. We believe that blockchain can help our partners reduce the burden of administration on their businesses and enable them to deliver best-in-class services to their customers.”

In 2016, the CBA and Wells Fargo conducted the world’s first interbank open account transaction combining the application of blockchain technology, smart contracts and IoT connectivity. The transaction, which took place in partnership with Brighann Cotton involved a cotton shipment from Texas, USA, to Qingdao, China, using a private blockchain and smart contracts enabled with IoT geolocation technology.

Implementing this framework on a larger scale in the future means that international transactions can be carried out with a high level of transparency, with all parties constantly aware of the location, authentication and condition of goods in transit.

In addition to the tracking of goods and added efficiency, the blockchain-enabled supply chain also enables transaction parties to upload and access key documents required by port authorities such as the bill of lading and certificates of origin.

The CBA’s experimental blockchain platform is being built on the Ethereum protocol because of its popularity and customizable functionality. When fully set up, it will take the form of a private blockchain made up of a closed network of trusted entities.

Capital gains on crypto transactions are easy to track, one at a time. What about when there are thousands?

Cryptocurrency capital gains taxes are becoming a point of interest for governments. In 2017, which will likely come to be known as the year crypto went mainstream, the combined market cap for all cryptocurrencies rocketed up from 15 billion to over 600 billion dollars. This kind of growth is hard to ignore — not just for the day traders and blockchain evangelists but for governments as well. This article focuses on how the United States specifically approaches crypto taxation.

Don Fort, the chief of the IRS criminal investigation unit, speaking on a recent tax conference panel, discussed at length how “cryptocurrency is becoming a new area of enforcement for him.” Other events like the IRS Coinbase Summons and the IRS warning sent to tax filers show the clear intentions of the U.S. government.

Because cryptocurrency is treated as property (not as currency), it is subject to capital gains taxes — just like stocks, bonds, real estate and other forms of personal property. Boiled down, you incur capital gains whenever you sell property for more than you purchased it for. You then report this gain on your yearly taxes, and that’s the end of it. The same is true for cryptocurrency.

While the intentions of the government are clear — they want you to report your crypto gains — active crypto traders know that the sheer volume that comes with trading crypto brings about a slew of challenges and headaches for tax reporting purposes. Before diving into these challenges, we should break down capital gains.

How Do I Calculate My Cryptocurrency Capital Gains?

Fair Market Value - Cost Basis = Capital Gains

Step 1 - Determine Your Cost Basis

Cost basis is the original value of an asset or, essentially, how much money you put in to acquire that asset. For crypto assets, it includes the purchase price plus all other costs associated with purchasing the cryptocurrency. Other costs typically include things like transaction fees and brokerage commissions from the exchanges where you purchased the crypto. So to calculate your cost basis you would carry out the following:

Step 2 - Determine the Fair Market Value at the Time of the Trade

The fair market value is the second data point you need to calculate your capital gains. Fair market value is the value of your cryptocurrency at the time you sold/traded it.

An example would look something like the following: You bought 0.05 Bitcoin for $100 dollars in June of 2017. You paid a $1.49 transaction fee to the exchange that you purchased from. Your cost basis is $101.49 for 0.05 Bitcoin. In November of 2017, you sold that same 0.05 Bitcoin for the fair market value which was $500 at the time. Based on this simple example, you have a capital gain of $398.51 (500 - 101.49).

Coin-to-Coin Trades

Here’s where things get much more difficult for the day traders. The IRS states that coin-to-coin trades are also taxable events. This means that when you trade BTC for any other altcoin, you incur a capital gain or capital loss that you have to file on your taxes. I want to lay out one more example to show how a coin-to-coin trading scenario would play out.

Let’s say you purchase $100 worth of bitcoin, including transaction and brokerage fees. That $100 currently buys about 0.01 BTC. Now, let’s say two months later you trade all of your 0.1 BTC for 0.16 ETH. How would you calculate your capital gains for this coin-to-coin trade?

It depends on what the fair market value of bitcoin was at the time of the trade. Let’s say at the time of the trade, 0.01 BTC was worth $160. This would put the fair market value of 0.01 BTC at $160. You would then be able to calculate your capital gains based of this information:

$160 – 100 = $60.00 capital gain

For that crypto-to-crypto trade, you would owe the government a percentage of your $60.00 gain.

The Huge Problem and the Elephant in the Room

It’s no secret that some people are trading crypto a lot. Many simply automate their trading strategies by utilizing crypto bots to trade on their behalf. Some of these folks make thousands and thousands of trades every single month. This sheer volume makes reporting and calculating every single trade for tax purposes virtually impossible. Just think: You need to retroactively look back on every trade you have made and determine what the fair market value in U.S. dollars was at that time of the trade, and then use that to calculate your gain or loss. It’s no wonder that an extremely small number of active traders paid taxes on their crypto activity in 2017.

However, with any problem comes the opportunity to provide a solution, and several companies and services are sprouting up to address this one.

How Do I Actually Report It?

In terms of how to report cryptocurrency on taxes in the United States, you need two specific forms. First, you need to fill out the IRS form 8949, which will detail each crypto trade that you made during the calendar year, as well as the date sold, date acquired, cost basis and capital gain. You then need to total up all of these items to arrive at your total gains and report that number on your 1040 Schedule D.

As always, when in doubt, consult a tax professional who is familiar and has dealt with cryptocurrency.

What Does the Future Look Like?

I think I am preaching to the choir when I say that crypto isn’t going away anytime soon. This is a technology that is going to change the world in ways that we currently cannot even fathom. On the flipside, the tax implications behind it aren’t going away either. When you come to grips with this reality, it is easy to prepare yourself for the future. Come up with a plan, do your research on all of the solutions currently on the marketplace, and prepare now. This will save you time and anxiety once next April rolls around.

Tax talk aside, I am incredibly excited about the future of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology. These are extremely exciting times that we live in; opportunity is right around the corner.

This is a guest post by David Kemmerer; it is for information purposes only and should not be construed as tax or investment advice. Views expressed are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Bitcoin Magazine or BTC Inc.

International trade, people without identity and financial exclusion are global development areas that stand to be radically improved with blockchain technology, according to Michelle Chivunga, regional advisor for the British Blockchain Association.

“I’m quite keen to help people in understanding what the potential of blockchain is,” said Chivunga in an interview with Bitcoin Magazine. “And at the same time I’m also quite passionate and I’ve done quite a bit of work and involvement with women’s economic empowerment programmes, working with different groups from UN women to the World Bank and a whole range of other organizations.”

“I’m also focused on emerging markets and nations as there are a lot of opportunities for technology to help,” she added.

Chivunga highlighted the plight of the financially excluded as a major area of global development where blockchain technology could bring unprecedented improvement: “I think it’s really important that we look at how we can use blockchain to help fund financial inclusion to help with access to digital assets that people have control over, rather than having central authorities controlling this.

“We want people who have control of their money and control of their own data. It’s absolutely significant because I think in my world, data is like the new money. If you can manage it and almost control use of your data, there’s a lot more power that you hold as well, so there’s that side of things as well. I think that’s absolutely critical.”

In a world where international trade has come under fire, she sees blockchains as being a much needed antidote to the potential damaging consequences of a global trade war.

“I’m a big promoter of international trade and opportunities for countries to export and interact.”

The increased visibility throughout the supply chain promotes trust and means governments can more easily protect consumers while businesses can safely do business with more reliable trading documents.

The World Economic Forum states that “with further investment and experimentation, blockchain could potentially hide confidential information to protect the interests of trading parties — pricing information, for example.”

“Take Africa, for example, we want to encourage a lot more interregional trade,” said Chivunga. “We can try and look at doing that by tapping on blockchain again because blockchain allows that opportunity for transparency and opportunities to have a more cost effective way of trading and doing business between different markets. So there’s massive potential there.”

Adding blockchain to the trading process has proven to reduce time spent completing trade-finance deals. What can now take a week to 10 days to complete could take just a couple of hours using blockchain technology, driving efficiencies that stand to transform not only emerging markets such as Africa but global markets as well.Solving Identity Issues

“A further area I see is, of course, identity,” Chivunga added, “which is absolutely huge and very very important because we have a lot of problems with refugees, with human trafficking, modern slavery. A lot of this does boil down to a lack of identity and people almost taking advantage of that, which leads to things like human trafficking.”

An astounding 14 percent of the global population, 1.1 billion people, are without identification, according to a 2017 report by the World Bank.

“If we are able to record the births of a nation,” Chivunga said, “we know how many children are born; they’ve got their identity that’s recorded on the blockchain. They can be tracked.”

She points out that “this is not tracking as in ‘Big Brother is watching you.’ It’s completely different in the sense that we’re able to use that data, even using machine learning or AI, to analyze that data for health needs or policy, or a whole range of other areas. We could make evidence-based decisions which we can use to plan ahead and foster solutions that are a bit more tailored. And really, people who are right at the bottom are the ones that do need that social change.”

However, Chivunga believes blockchain-based technology carries some promise for freedom and positive change with its potential for securely tracking and storing people’s identity.

So what’s the key to unravelling the potential of the blockchain to where it becomes a global solution to some of the world’s worst problems?

“We have to have more education around separating bitcoin from blockchain technology, and also education around how blockchain can actually be used and by whom,” says Chivunga. “It’s not a magic wand, and we have to be quite cautious about how we throw in the hype.

The Chamber of Digital Commerce’s Token Alliance is producing a new group of guidelines built to help the cryptocurrency and initial coin offering (ICO) markets grow responsibly. Released today as a whitepaper, the report is entitled “Understanding Digital Tokens: Market Overviews & Guidelines for Policymakers & Practitioners.”

The paper will specifically pertain to “utility tokens,” which provide users with future access to products or services. In these instances, ICOs will raise money for new blockchain products by offering investors future use of the items being developed (usually at a discounted rate).

Former Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) commissioner and CEO of Patomak Global Partners Paul Atkins comments, “These principles are an important tool for responsible growth and smart regulation that strikes the right balance between protecting investors while allowing for innovation in this new technological frontier. We think it is important to explain the unique attributes of blockchain-based digital assets, which are not all strictly investment based, and provide guidance to consumers, regulators and the industry.”

The whitepaper is broken up into three distinct sections. The first offers a comprehensive overview of current and future regulations to give investors a stronger understanding of securities laws in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Australia.

The second part showcases industry-developed principles for both trading platforms and token sponsors to better promote safe and legal business practices and lower the risks to organizers and traders.

The third and final portion of the report provides a general discussion of the growth and evolution of the digital token space thus far.

Perianne Boring is the founder and president of the Chamber of Digital Commerce. Speaking with Bitcoin Magazine, she said that the lack of clear regulation in the cryptocurrency arena, particularly surrounding ICOs, has led to several unsafe practices.

“The Chamber of Digital Commerce is advocating for regulatory clarity,” she said. “Up until now, there has been an absence of clarity on the regulatory landscape for ICOs and utility tokens. Token generation events, which include initial coin offerings, can offer important opportunities for businesses and individuals to participate in token platforms. These platforms offer services that require the token to use the platform. As we have seen, some ICOs have been fraudulent or otherwise violated the law. In these circumstances, purchasers can lose the funds or the value of the token they purchased.”

On an international scale, cryptocurrency regulatory measures are a hodgepodge of disjointed approaches with varying degrees of governmental acceptance, as officials around the globe have set their own paces for regulating the cryptocurrency industry. Some countries, like Malta and Switzerland, have enacted friendly legislation in an attempt to attract industry movers to their borders, while others, such as the United States, have taken a slower and cautious approach to regulation.

Boring believes regulations could introduce legitimacy and protections into a landscape still obscured in popular opinion by skepticism and doubts that are made murkier still by persistent manipulation and fraud.

“Fraud also impacts the reputation of this growing industry. Our goal is to minimize incidences of fraudulent activity while promoting those innovators and businesses who issue tokens for use on their platforms or otherwise comply with securities laws.”

Boring explains that the report is likely to change over time as the industry changes, that researchers will add chapters and sections to the whitepaper as more countries become involved in ICOs and the crypto space, and that the report is an important first step toward ensuring the cryptocurrency market remains clean and unmarred by financial crime.

“These industry-developed principles are the first set of guidelines for the token industry,” she asserts. “They represent a compendium of laws worldwide to ensure that businesses are fully aware of the spectrum of laws that can apply. It also provides market trends to help assess the scope and breadth of this industry. This is our proactive approach to address some of the biggest issues facing the token ecosystem.”

Based in Washington, D.C., the Chamber of Digital Commerce is the world’s largest trade association representing cryptocurrencies and the blockchain. The Token Alliance is one of the organization’s many initiatives and is composed of approximately 350 participants ranging from technologists and economists, to token experts, lawyers and former regulators.

The world of cryptocurrency is in a constant state of flux. As a result, the process of sorting through untold amounts of background information and data can be a laborious, time-consuming endeavor. Continually subjected to emotions and opinions, investors are often unable to reliably assess the informational signals needed to make informed market decisions.

That’s where WatermelonBlock, a data analytics company featuring a suite of products that deliver cryptocurrency insights directly to the consumer, comes in. Through a mix of data points gathered from social media as well as traditional technical analysis, this emerging startup assists investors in staying abreast of critical data and information sets in real time.

WatermelonBlock seeks to deliver these insights to all levels of investors, from experienced traders seeking to stay ahead of the curve relative to their personalized portfolio to newcomers attempting to mitigate the information overload often tied to their first major investments.

It’s here that the company recognizes a gap in the ability of ordinary algorithms to analyze the size of critical data sets. By deploying the computing power of IBM Watson, arguably the most advanced AI platform in the world, WatermelonBlock is able to scan, categorize, weigh and analyze big data sets within seconds, providing users with current market information and real-time actionable insights right at their fingertips.

More Accurate and Better-Informed Trading Decisions

WatermelonBlock is not just a proof of concept — it’s an actual working protocol that puts user experience first, all with the goal of integrating cryptocurrency investments into any lifestyle through a 24/7 stream of market analytics.

A free insights smartphone app powered by WatermelonBlock is replete with a sleek, simple user interface and is scheduled for release in Q4 of this year. It will feature neatly packaged, real-time cryptocurrency, market and initial coin offering (ICO) analysis; personalized portfolio notifications and a digital wallet.

In phase two for the app, which will be released in Q3 of 2019, the WatermelonBot will be launched — an automated artificial intelligence (AI) bot that can execute trades according to user-set preferences. This second phase will also include a more advanced digital wallet and payments platform, allowing for more rapid trading and fulfillment.

Driving this initiative is the WatermelonBlock token (WMB), which serves as the on-ramp for decision makers seeking to access the suite of sentiment analysis and AI trading tools, all without difficult-to-navigate fee structures. All prices are simple and transparent, allowing users to focus on markets and their investments versus costs.

The WatermelonBlock pre-token sale will commence on July 27, with the full public sale beginning on August 27. Investors can gain exclusive access to the WatermelonBlock presale by registering on the WatermelonBlock website.

Seeding the Road Ahead

WatermelonBlock’s director and UX developer, Elliot Rothfield, has a passion for creating communities, particularly for the millennial set. With several successful startup businesses under his belt in addition to serving as the co-founder of a ten-year-old international community and arts festival, he is now putting the full force of his energy behind WatermelonBlock’s app suite.

“Through my involvement in one of Australia’s largest community and arts festivals, I began to notice that there were a lot of struggling artists that I was working with,” Rothfield said. “Many were able to support their craft and their lifestyle through cryptocurrency, as opposed to work through menial jobs. This is where my entrance into the cryptocurrency market began. Being an avid follower of the market, I noticed the volatility of the market straight away.”

Rothfield added that the name WatermelonBlock comes from the Japanese Watermelon — “It’s fun, it’s quirky and it’s memorable. We really wanted to go against a conventional blockchain name. We figured that there were enough names like Tron, Dash and Laser Gun 5000."

With respect to the value proposition that WatermelonBlock hopes to deliver, Rothfield has got a clear vision.

“People are sick of biased information and ‘fake news,’” he said. “They are getting smarter and they are realizing that a lot of what is being fed to them via the media is heavily biased, with publishers often having a vested interest. As a result, these individuals are looking for smarter ways to trade (and that goes for any market), as well as more efficient ways to conduct market research.”

He added that WatermelonBlock’s ability to combine sentiment analysis with geolocation and indexing provides a much better system for consumers.

“WatermelonBlock hopes to capture the pulse of both cryptocurrency and traditional markets, delivering insights and information accessible to all,” said Rothfield. “In 12 to 18 months, we see ourselves running with a full suite of applications to provide market analysis across all industries.”

Note: Trading and investing in digital assets is speculative and can be high risk. Based on the shifting business and regulatory environment of such a new industry, this content should not be considered investment or legal advice.

Today Chuck, Doug and Danny dive into some crypto basics. Doug as always being the proprietor of Phoenix Crypto an ATM and Blockchain training service in Phoenix Arizona comes to us from the studio in Phoenix. Chuck and Danny join in from Denver Co.In the coming weeks we'll be adding a new show on the Bloomberg Business radio channels in Miami, Houston, Denver and San Francisco so stay tune for that.We are really looking forward to reaching outside of the microcosm of Crypto and reaching new users in the general public hopefully creating a new Cryptophiles.

ETF’s are back in the news this week with the Winklevoss twins of Gemini getting rejected again, while investment firm Direxion was delayed till September on a final decision. Crypto continues to make inroads into the financially impoverished nation of Venezuela, with Dash now becoming more popular than Bitcoin for black market purchases of basic necessities.

Qtum is the latest blockchain technology company to become available on AWS, making the creation of, and deployment of Qtum developed dApps that much easier. Just north of Qtum headquarters, we see the cryptocurrency exchange Binance continue to grow and expand with a new push into South Korea.

The United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has rejected the Winklevosses’ latest attempt to list a bitcoin ETF. After having a proposal rejected last year, they had hoped to secure their Winklevoss Bitcoin Trust on BATS Global Market’s BZX stock exchange, but the June filing was curbed in a 3-1 vote.

The SEC has postponed the review of five Bitcoin ETFs proposed by investment firm Direxion Asset Management, as it needs more time to study the proposal before reaching a final decision, which they say will come on September 21, 2018. The statement reads, “The Commission finds it appropriate to designate a longer period within which to issue an order approving or disapproving the proposed rule change so that it has sufficient time to consider this proposed rule change. Accordingly, the Commission … designates September 21, 2018, as the date by which the Commission shall either approve or disapprove the proposed rule change.”

The Dash cryptocurrency is establishing itself as one of Venezuela's most popular cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin may still be king on the international scene, but in South America’s northernmost country, dash is vying for superiority. And, according to Latin American exchange Cryptobuyer, it has all but usurped bitcoin in the region.

Qtum is a hybrid platform which uses the Account Attraction Layer, an interface layer, to merge the strength of Bitcoin’s blockchain with the Ethereum Virtual Machine to build decentralized applications. Designed as a toolkit, the platform uses the proof-of-stake model to reduce the network’s computational difficulty while mitigating and solving scalability. Qtum has now launched its decentralized application (DApp) development platform on Amazon Web Services (AWS). With this launch, AWS users and developers will be able to develop and launch smart contracts using an Amazon Machine Image (AMI), made up of Qtum Core, Solidity and Qmix web IDE.

Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange by daily volume, is expanding from its home base in Hong Kong into South Korea. While South Korea is presumed to be the third-largest crypto market after the U.S. and Japan, it hasn't been a smooth ride for the cryptocurrency exchanges operating there. Bithumb and Coinrail were hacked earlier this year, while tax authorities have raided Coinone on tax evasion allegations. Binance seems to be undeterred by all this, as it has been laying the groundwork for its expansion into South Korea for a while. Last year, the company added Korean language support to its site.